This is a completely hypothetical question that myself and a colleague have been wondering/debating about, and we thought some of the knowledgeable people at SF could shed some light.
Say, for example, you have an ad server that delivers around 10 million ad impressions per day. Utilizing the linux, nginx, memcached, MongoDB (or similar NoSQL database), highly optimized code, and a CDN, could it be reasonable to assume that a dedicated server could handle this all by itself (we are talking about a fairly good sized dedi with anywhere from 10-16GB of RAM and a 12 core xeon processor)? The main activities here would be serving the static banner ads, and doing some quick calls to the database to select an ad and update impression and click stats. Any thoughts?
Answer
It’s a pretty vague question, despite lots of details and buzzwords, but I would say “definitely maybe.”
16GB isn’t all that much for a server anymore (my desktops have 16GB, by comparison; I rarely deploy less than 32GB in a server)… and depending on your variety of impressions, you might consider SSDs or ramdisk or some combination to improve access time for db and images. I/O is likely to be a stronger point of resistance than RAM, although you could easily get a 32GB server and devote more RAM to memcache.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : James Simpson , Answer Author : Robert Novak
